It has pretty much a "centralized government" in name only. Think of a strictly without pay volunteer fire department. You may be the president in name, but you can't order anyone to do anything that they don't want to do. You have no money coming into the government that people don't volunteer to give the government and if you try to change the arrangement you end up either getting laughed at or shot.

Zeppflyer: I originally intended it to be just those three, however I read an article that was pretty convincing that Bush actually didn't win the popular vote in Ohio, (and with it the presidency) but stole it by rigging a number of ballots in heavily democractic areas to already have 3rd party candidates marked for president so that when they voted for Kerry there were actually two candiates listed so as to cancel out the presidental vote. I don't know if it's true or not, but seeing how little respect Bush has for the Consititution with the "Patriot Act", the "Military Commissions Act" and so on, I don't NOT believe it.

Wouldn't be perfect, an outside participant can still be an interested participant. If the machines were manufactured, and maintained, by an outside party, they might still have an interest in the outcome, and thus an incentive to tamper.Better would be an open source machine, with anyone able to audit the code, at all levels, and keep the paper trail until two terms of office have passed.

For a plausible scenario. What if one candidate was in favor of stricter banking laws, especially as they applied to overseas accounts, while the other held the opinion that what happens off US soil is none of the federal governments business? Wouldn't the swiss people be more in favor of the second candidate?

The answer to all this is pretty much the TPB one: if there's no power in the positions, there's very little incentive to cheat. I mean, why would anybody lie, cheat and steal to become president of the confederacy? It'd be like spending a billion dollars to get a trophy saying "greatest dad in the world". Only with the confederacy's attitude towards government, it'd be more like winning first and second place in a farting contest.

I'd actually be pretty surprised that the confederacy "government" would've been as active as it was. Instead of just openly declaring itself as a general-access forum, selling ads to cover the expense, and then letting it meet whenever to provide the service it actually *did* in the storyline: let people warn others of impending threats if any present themselves. Forewarned is forearmed, but it didn't really have any power to do more than that. Or what such a private forum could've done: solicit donations so that the people of the confederacy could just organize a response pretty close to on their own. Or just know about it so they could take whatever steps they deemed necessary.

"Government" only as powerful as its people isn't really a governing body. It's just those silly people who meet every so often to have a fireside chat, maybe try to sway people to believe they need less or more authority in their lives if that's their bent, and decide who's gonna preside over their get togethers, if anyone, like any lodge meeting only in this case televised.

Otherwise, out here in the real world, it's like the slaves voting for who their driver is going to be this week. Plenty of incentive for whoever gets the job, so there's plenty of incentive to lie, cheat, steal, and kill to get in. And plenty of incentive to buy special favors, like a little leeway on whippings and extra rations. In other words, subsidy and tax breaks. And simply getting a "better" voting system isn't going to change that fundamental fact until we rid the position of its special status. Namely the right to initiate force. All methods will lead to the same conclusion.

Oh, and I've given up and gone ancap from being minarchist with just heavy sympathies for anarcho-capitalism. If the difference between police/politicians and bandits/warlords is only a matter of steadily disappearing degree, there's really no point in hoping they can be made into a "charitable" protection against warlordism. To rob them of the reason they can abuse their positions is ironically to render the position into something other than itself. Police without tax money supporting them and authorization to initiate force are just a security company that may be at least partially funded by donation. Politicians without the power to enforce binding regulation on people who don't consent to it become talk show hosts or something with even less respectability. Tax men become thieves rightly shot at when they try to ply their trade. And so on.

And I don't think we really need them. I mean, I'd probably pay the equivalent of $10/month to have a security company on standby in the event I need a posse to defend my home. The same for the other services. And then at least the fact that I can cancel my contract if it's just too useless to hedge my safety every month, or switch to a different company if they're not providing the service level I expect. And the only argument against this arrangement repeats the earlier point. The concern becomes that a single or coalition becomes powerful enough to become government. I don't see that it's different than what the monopolistic police/military government is already doing. So, worst case is nothing is particularly lost. Best case is much liberty gets gained. While keeping a system of government closer to what we have, the worst case scenario is we turn into the TPB US of A. Or get a chairman mao to bloodily massacre signs of dissent. And the best case scenario with it is that we end up having to hold a lot of very big guns at whatever government we keep's head until the end of time.

So, what's my ideal voting system? I don't care. Voting for representatives has certainly not secured our liberties. Maybe a direct vote with the ability to assign proxies with the requirement of unanimous consent would work. Maybe it would just ditch unanimous consent in the same manner that the Federal Government has ditched the Constitution: simply promise everyone it'll be safer, more comfortable, and easier that way and ignore the law. It doesn't matter. The one thing of importance is liberty, and if that actually means everybody elects rabbits instead of people, and does so by dedicating every carrot they eat to one "candidate" rabbit in a year, I'm perfectly fine with that. I'm just sick of talk talk about changing the color of the drapes on the titanic after it's already hit the iceberg.

Leviathan: Just let me add to that a story that I read several years ago. Several hundred years ago, a Chinese prirate was captured and brought before the emperor so that the emperor could pronounce his crimes and sentence him to death. The emperor asked him if he had anything to say in his own defense. Knowing that the sentence was already fixed and that he would die the prirate bravely told off the ruler. "What I do with my one ship you do with your entire fleet." "Your men kill and plunder just as mine do." "But because I am not the government I will die for my crimes but you will continue on and grow wealthy." In my humble opinion that pretty much sums up government.

Hence why I've pretty much given up the illusion that government that is actually government can be anything else. Pending places like Somalia being allowed to evolve into a stable anarcho-anything without the US and/or UN and/or NATO sticking its fat nose in to try and "re-establish order", thus condemning said countries to more chaos and violence, the most I'll concede to a statist is that some tyrannies are more heinous than others, and at the least the warlords can be worse than dealing with the Fed. Though they at least aren't lying about what they're doing. Otherwise, I do believe the situation to work towards isn't trying to "this time do it right" with government, and thus somehow magically prevent it from turning into the same slop we're dealing with now all over again. The situation to work towards is simply ridding ourselves of a parasite.